The Daughters of the Late Colonel: Imagery 5 key examples

Mansfield personifies the sun as an animate entity who "explores" the room here. Of course, it’s not actually the “sun” who is exploring. The narrator uses the “sun’s” gaze to reflect the elements of the room around her, which are attracting Josephine’s attention. The “sun” and Josephine are both “puzzled” as they consider the scant remnants of her mother's existence within their home.

The visual imagery Mansfield uses here is striking and purposeful: things that would otherwise seem unique and characterful lose their power and importance. The mother’s earrings, which are shaped like tiny pagodas and a black feather boa are odd, memorable items. However, even though they’re still there, compared to the overwhelming presence of the Colonel, they barely register. Much like her fading photograph, Josephine and Constantia’s mother recedes into the backdrop of their father’s more assertive legacy.

The photograph, which Josephine observes is slowly losing its clarity, symbolizes the mother's roles and legacy in a patriarchal society. Women, the story seems to suggest, are shadowed and diminished by the dominant presence of male authority. The mother's near-absence is part of the story’s narrative about the marginalization and erasure of women's identities in this period.

The reader gets a vivid picture here of the bright tones of the room—which Josephine and Constantia are suddenly reminded of—and the sunlight’s ability to draw attention to them. The house’s previous descriptions made it seem gray and devoid of color. Here, however, the sunlight, initially "pale red" and fluctuating, settles and deepens to a "golden" hue on the red carpet. Previously to this, nothing in the Colonel's unhappy house was described as being warm-toned or “golden.” The entire place was dour and tomb-like, and Mansfield implies that it has always been depressing and dark. It’s as though the sun can only now enter, as the Colonel is not there to scare it away.

In a similar vein, the auditory imagery provided by the "bubbling notes" from the barrel-organ injects a sense of life and movement into the scene. The notes, "round, bright," and "carelessly scattered," evoke a feeling of childish freedom. The organ’s “bubbles” infiltrate Josephine and Constantia’s usually restrained and somber environment. The absence of their father, who would have been furious and violent if they had let the organ-grinder play there while he lived, allows the women to appreciate the music in a new way. These moments of reevaluation are some of the ways Mansfield hints that the late Colonel’s daughters might be much better off now that he has departed.

The slippers and gowns Mansfield describes here are more than clothes and shoes—they are indications of the sisters' personalities. In a world where their personal choices are as limited as the one inside the Pinner house, their choice of colors is one of the only indications of their identities. Josephine's “dark-red” suggests her relatively bold character, while Constantia's preference for an "indefinite" green might represent a more passive, “indefinite” nature. The shift from red and green to black, therefore, suggests a loss of individuality and the overshadowing of their personalities by the all-consuming reality of their father's death. This imagined color change is a visual metaphor for Josephine’s bleak vision of their future, where their “green” and “red” identities are dulled and oppressed by the conventions of mourning.

Despite their color choices, neither of the women are particularly “bold” in their personal lives. Mansfield uses a simile to emphasize this, as Josephine imagines what might happen as they lose their "green" and "red" to mourning black. She thinks the change will make them “creep” around like “black cats.” The women had been forced to "creep" around the house carefully when their father was alive, and Josephine worries that switching to black clothes will make this even worse after his death. This comparison does more than evoke the visual of cautious, secretive movement, however. Black cats are a symbol of both bad and good luck in British culture, depending on the circumstances in which one sees them. In their “black cat” robes, the women will become physical manifestations of their own uncertain future.

The simile "like the doors in dreams" conveys Constantia's sense of disorientation and the surreal atmosphere of the room. Mansfield is talking about dream-logic here, where things might not always follow the rules of physics. The women feel like they can pass through the door without opening it, which is physically impossible. This comparison illustrates the difficulty the sisters have in grappling with their new reality without their father. Entering the bedroom previously would have been a taboo act. Now that it has become a necessity, it feels surreal.

Once they’ve completed this dream-like transportation into the Colonel’s room, Mansfield uses visual and tactile imagery to describe the room’s coldness and whiteness for the reader. The room is filled with covered objects, and the blinds are drawn. The space feels untouched and preserved, like a tomb or a house shut up for a period of absence. When Constantia tentatively reaches into the air, she is half-expecting a snowflake to fall. The aura of the room is so chilling and death-laden that it feels like winter inside the house. Josephine's imagined sensation of a tingling nose from the cold only adds to this. Their sense of intrusion and wrongness at being in their father's bedroom is so strong that it manifests physically as these wintry chills.

Here, Mansfield gives human characteristics to the sunlight, which invades the room and interacts with Josephine as if it were a person. Initially, the sun aggressively "presses" and "thieves its way in." Because the house has been so shut up in mourning, this feels incongruous. It gives the sunlight a sense of action and intent as it illuminates the room and its contents.

As the sun "touche[s] Josephine gently," the narrative shifts, using personification to reflect a change in Josephine's internal state. The sun, which Mansfield just described as “stealing” its way in, now offers a comforting caress to the confused and mourning woman. It goes from being an unpleasant reminder of the invasive outside world to one that seems inviting and pleasant. Rather than showing Josephine things in the house that she doesn’t want to see—like the “furniture and the photographs”— she is "drawn over to the window by gentle beams" to look outside at the world beyond.